


See I Was Dead When I Woke Up this Morning

by t_a_f_k_a_r



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter/Funhaus RPF
Genre: Discussion of Gladiatorial shiznet, FAHC, Immortal Fake AH Crew
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-27
Updated: 2016-04-27
Packaged: 2018-06-04 19:56:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6673495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/t_a_f_k_a_r/pseuds/t_a_f_k_a_r
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His Life starts with Death, and they are the only entities to which he will be a slave.</p>
            </blockquote>





	See I Was Dead When I Woke Up this Morning

**Author's Note:**

> I have started watching Spartacus...

_For what has been done,_  
_Cannot be undone._  
~Seven Devils, Florence + the Machine

* * *

Some people say that life starts at the moment of conception, but that’s not true. Not for him. His life starts with a desperate gasp of breath, blood suddenly remembering all the passageways of his shuddering body as his heart stutters its way back to something halfway resembling a steady beat. His life begins after death and it continues thereafter.

Sometimes he struggles to remember his first life. Vague flashes of memory surfacing at all the worst times and in all the wrong ways. He’s been alive a long time. He’s so very old and he remembers so little of his first lives. But his body remembers.

His body remembers the automatic reflexes that came from living constantly at war with others of his kind, and with the environment around them. His body remembers the long nights waiting for someone to strike. His body remembers the harsh training, and the crack of a whip against his back. His body remembers the Arena; his body remembers how they would make him fight. His body remembers the scars, long since faded.

In the winter, his knees ache, broken or lost so many times he forgets, sometimes, that they are whole and unscarred with each new life. His body flinches automatically when anyone comes near him with a blade, he’s been cut so many times he forgets, sometimes, that his new body has no scars save those which he gained in his first life.

His body remembers everything, whether the scars remain to show it, but his brain is still a human brain, for all that he is immortal. And human brains are only capable of containing so much information, and his is no different. So many lives, so much information, so much knowledge, all forgotten.

He doesn’t talk about it. Not to anyone. Not to Ryan, who’d gone by another name in the Arena. Not to Ryan, who had taken him under his wing all that time ago. Not to Ryan, who bled and died with him upon the sand. Not to Ryan, who helped him escape. He doesn’t talk about it. Not to Ryan, who is the only one with a hope to understand what it had truly been like to be immortal in the Roman World.

Some say that life starts from the moment of conception, but that’s not true. Not for him. His life has always started with his death, and he cannot remember a time when it has not. He once shed his blood on the sands of the Arena in the hope of gaining his freedom, and one day he took it with the blood of his masters.

His Life starts with Death, and they are the only entities to which he will be a slave.

He is _Free_ and that is the only piece of information he considers worthy of carrying from one life into the next.

* * *

 _See, I was dead when I woke up this morning.  
_I'll be dead before the day is done.__  
~Seven Devils, Florence + the Machine.


End file.
